The New Pictures

Perils of Pauline (Paramount) is the best remembered of the old serials which starred Pearl White during the wild, playful childhood of the movies (roughly 1910 to 1920). It is also a new, bright-colored, strident biocomedy about the late Miss White, starring Betty Hutton. Betty starts as a sweatshop girl, moves on to become a dumb theatrical trouper, bursts into bloom as the queen of silent serials, and fades off into a Paris nightclub when movie audiences tire of her innocent melodramatics. On the way up she falls in love with an arrogant stage actor (John Lund) who resents her screen success; in the last scene, after a crippling fall, it is implied that she sacrifices her thin chances for life rather than stand him up on a date.

Betty Hutton has a capacity for pathos which is rather crudely exploited in this film, and a capacity for comedy which is exploited just as crudely, but oftener and more successfully. Several of her missteps as a stage neophyte are good for laughs, and there are some funny scenes about moviemaking, in which she is stoutly abetted by William Demarest as a director, by Constance Collier as a high-nosed old ham actress, and by such old masters of journeyman slapstick as Chester Conklin and Snub Pollard. There is some faint hint of the toughness of the people who made the old movies, and a fair suggestion of the way they did their work, like children making up games as they went along.

Perils is a good-humored show, mainly designed to please people who enjoy hissing the villain. Those who used to be too excited to hiss, and who wildly applauded Pearl's always predictable but always miraculous escapes, will feel there is a good deal missing. The chances are that Pearl herself, with her prominent film career and her long, sporting afterglow in Europe, was a much more interesting woman than is suggested in this movie. It is also possible that a movie which showed the making of those first, primitive flickers as it really happened would be good for a lot more than a cheerful jeer.

Ivy (Universal-International) suggests that James M. Cain and other hard-shelled melodramatists could have taken lessons from the Edwardians, and, in particular, from the works of Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, who wrote this story. Ivy (Joan Fontaine), a product of that placid era, is married to an impoverished wastrel (Richard Ney) who is as eager as she to live high, and climb higher, but isn't as smart about it. Ivy is carrying on with a young doctor (Patric Knowles) who isn't so very smart either. When she foresees a brighter future with rich, glamorous Herbert Marshall, it dawns on her that she had better get rid of both husband and lover.

Ivy is not really a cruel girl, just a lass who loves nice things. So murder and allied villainies are not easy deeds for her. Some of the best of this melodrama grows out of her pity for her guileless victims, and her shamed horror over the things a young woman may be called upon to do just to get ahead.

Joan Fontaine gives a believable performance as an avid, hysterical type which has certainly not become extinct in recent decades; Sir Cedric Hardwicke is coldly effective as Scotland Yard. The picture could get by with good marks on their two performances and its story. What gives it special quality is that it is exceptionally well set, propped, costumed and lighted, and that it is told, as all movies should be and few are, more for the eyes than the ears. Chief credit for this goes to Producer William Cameron Menzies, a master of decor and lighting. Even Miss Fontaine's parasols are at once beautiful and sinister; the dancing couples in a ballroom are so sculptured in light that they seem three-dimensional; and in one elaborate shot Miss Fontaine and her lover, necking in an elegant marble pavilion, are discovered by the jabbering glare of fireworks.

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